“This is the heliport. Should we launch now, or should we wait until the fighters hit us?”
I put my hand lightly over her mouth. She flinched away. “Let me listen and think for a second.”
She shut up, which was nice of her, and I listened. At first, I didn’t hear anything ominous, but then I caught it. A distant screaming sound of wind moving fast through turbo-props and ram-jets.
“Get up against the walls.”
That’s all I had time to say, and we moved close and hugged stone. Soon, explosions echoed. The ceiling bled dirt, and the chamber rocked. Everything in sight vibrated and every light flickered. We were being bombed.
The AA guns chattered, of course. They sent up thousands of hot bolts into the sky. I thought I heard a fighter go down, crashing onto the island somewhere, but it could have been something else.
“They must have launched the wing even before they took out the missile barrage,” I told Abigail. “The fighters couldn’t have gotten here so fast otherwise.”
“I’m glad to know Earth pilots are so efficient.”
“Just hope they don’t pop open the roof on this thing, or we’re toast.”
We huddled down there for several minutes while the air raid went on. It seemed like a long time, but soon the screaming fighters were fading back to the west.
“It’s now or never,” I told her, and we scrambled into the copter.
That’s when we got our first serious push-back from the dog-boys in charge of this place. One of them thought he was a pilot, and that this was his vehicle. He snarled at me, and even lifted his lips at Abigail.
“Listen,” she told the dog, “we need to take off pronto. I’ll fly, just go back to your bunk.”
The dog-man shook his head and sat there, snarling.
“Bad dog!” I told him. “Shoo! Git!”
Abigail pushed me back. “Okay, okay,” she said soothingly. “This is your copter. You’re the pilot. Just fly it, and take us back to the lab island. Let’s go.”
We climbed in, and the pilot looked at us wonderingly, but he did as he’d been ordered. He revved the engine, and the rotors began to spin.
Automatically, the doors overhead slid back, and we glided up into the sky.
“If one of those fighters is still around, he’ll shoot us down for sure,” Abigail complained.
“True, but I don’t see any of them. They’ve gone back to Dominus.”
Abigail swung her head in my direction suddenly. She wasn’t a dumb girl, whereas I’m mentally challenged on the best of days.
“Dominus? Isn’t that your legion’s transport? How did you know which ship it was up there? You said there was a flock of them coming.”
“Uh… just a guess, really. But Dominus is one of the newest models. It looks like that big thing, and it’s faster than most transports. It only makes sense that if one of them survived, it would be my ship.”
She seemed to buy this, and she went back to looking out to sea.
We rose up over the island, and the scene below was one of destruction and carnage. The three big warehouses were all shattered and smoking. Craters marked the spot where every one of the seven missile batteries had been. The AA gun batteries were knocked out as well.
“The boys really did a number on this place,” I said with a hint of pride.
“They sure did. Will they drop next?”
I pointed up at the sky. Overhead, white contrails marked objects falling from above. There were hundreds of them.
“Looks like they dropped already. That’s a full cohort, if I had to make a guess.”
The radio squawked right then, and the dog-pilot cocked his ears. He listened, then swung the ship around toward the island again.
“Hey! Don’t turn around, rover!” I told him, but he ignored me. I turned toward Abigail. “Can you fly a copter?”
“No.”
I shrugged. “Well, it’s time to learn how.”
Then I struck the pilot from behind. It took seven hammer-blows to the skull to put him out, and he wasn’t even wearing a helmet. I was impressed.
By that time, the airship was spinning and losing altitude. I pushed the body out the open canopy and made room for Abigail to take his seat.
She fought the controls, but the best she could do was land us on the rocky beach—and when I say land, I mean crash.
When we climbed out of the wreckage, I looked up and gaped at the sky.
“Wow! A Legion Varus drop is a thing to behold, isn’t it?”
The fighters had pulled out and left our island a smoking ruin. But the fun wasn’t over with yet. The troops were coming down now, scads of them. Their pods were firing retros at the last possible moment to break their hellish descent.
Right nearby, not fifty meters down the beach, a pair of pods came to rest. The explosive bolts blew with loud popping noises, and two light troopers sprang out, guns up and ready.
Abigail turned to run. “Let’s get out of here, McGill!”
I reached out a long, long leg and hooked her ankle with mine. She did a facer on the sand, and I landed on top of her. Pressing my mouth to into her hair and her ear, I said one thing.
“Sorry.”
This was a lie, of course, but it was a heartfelt lie. I really wanted it to be true, see, and so I guesstimated that the Good Lord would give me a pass on it when I someday died my final death.
“You fucker, James!”
“Get a grip, girl. We’re on a burning island. Running away will only get us shot in the back.”
“Okay, okay. Let me up.”
